Looking For A Few Good Writers
… or aspiring ones, anyway!
My local writing group recently lost a member, and we’d been wanting to expand anyway, so the need to incorporate new members has become quite pressing. And it’s brought up a lot of questions that are probably good to consider: who are we? What are the group’s goals? Who exactly is the person we want to have join us? Is there an ideal candidate? What can we offer that person? What do we need from him or her?
And can the group come to a consensus around any of these issues?
These are valid questions, I think, to ask of any writing group, local or virtual, large or small. We happen to be asking them because we want to have some new members join us; but you might want to consider asking them even if your group isn’t looking to expand. It’s easy to lose focus, to forget the original (or even evolving) mandate, to lose track of what you’re doing. Questions like these bring you back to the center.
One of my clients is a marketing firm that recently engaged me to write an operations manual for the company. An operations manual sets out everything about the company, from where the paper for the copier is located to the policy around sick days, from the specific steps entailed in everything the company does to how it hires new employees. It forces a company to review in minute detail every aspect of its business, much of which has never been articulated or was articulated so long ago that it’s been forgotten. In essence, the operations manual tells the company’s story.
Staying in touch with one’s story isn’t just important in the corporate world: it’s important for any group. The story allows for group members to bond, to recall common goals, to feel part of something larger than any individual member. Losing a sense of history means losing part of ourselves. And any group needs that backstory, the communal equivalent of “how I met your mother.”
Groups also need the ongoing part of the story: this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is why we do it. My writing group decided early on, for example, to break with the common genre-specific considerations: we are fiction writers and poets, and have discovered that having a good mind and a willingness to take risks compensates for not being as schooled in each others’ genres. It’s a decision that has worked for us, and certainly would not work for others. It’s part of our story, and it needs to be articulated.
Think of the groups to which you belong (and if you don’t belong to a writing group, seriously consider joining or starting one). What are their stories? Is your story still aligned with theirs? A periodic refresh of this process can be enormously helpful. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Process Matters, The Writing Life, About Writing on July 2nd, 2008